Celeste Fremon

AQEELA SHERRILLS IS AN ACTIVE PROPONENT of forgiveness. The charismatic head of the Watts-based Community Self-Determination Institute (CSDI), Sherrills has dedicated much of his adult life to helping gang members change theirs. But in January 2004, he had his philosophy directly tested when his son, Terrell, an 18-year-old freshman at......

LAST MONTH, L.A. County sheriff’s deputies — plus a dog — raided the Boyle Heights home of Frances and Luis Aguilar and their six children. The deputies were looking for drugs and guns. They found no weapons, but they did find several baggies full of drugs, specifically 13 grams of......

AT 6 O’CLOCK LAST FRIDAY NIGHT, around 200 people, most of them African-American, gathered at the Hope for Life Foundation at Manchester and Normandie in South Los Angeles, for what was billed as an urgent town hall meeting about the ongoing jail riots. By week’s end, the “disturbances,” as they......

IN RETROSPECT, JENNY OLMEDA says she knew something was wrong last Saturday when she went to visit her husband, Augustin Velasquez, at the North County Correctional Facility. The state-of-the-art jail is part of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s maximum-security complex, located 40 miles northwest of downtown L.A., up the......

It's late on a Friday afternoon when an unusual mix of police and South L.A. community leaders manage to cram themselves into 100 folding chairs in an uncomfortably warm classroom at the back of St. Michael’s Catholic Church on Manchester Boulevard. A quick glance around the room suggests that nobody’s......

Photos by Ted SoquiSuzie Lopez's small white coffin is set up in the middle of the living room surrounded by enormous sprays of daisies, mums and white roses, plus a smattering of pastel-colored stuffed animals which certain mourners have brought in lieu of flowers. A large white sheet has been......

Photos by Ted Soqui The day after 19-month-old Susie Peña died during a shootout between her father, Raul Peña, and LAPD officers, family members and friends arrive at the site of the carnage, partly to grieve, but also to attempt to figure out how events could have gone so hideously......

The Aguilar family’s circumstances are now, after a year, still alarmingly on the edge. Luis’ new job is a wonderful piece of good news. But the truth is, he and Frances aren’t just one paycheck away from disaster, they are right at disaster level, which is where their financial status......

Photographs by Anne Fishbein Bless me anyway. I want more life. I can’t help myself. I do. I’ve lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much, much worse, but . . .You see them living anyway. —Tony Kushner, Angels in America Two brief moments of......